If you’re looking for a new laptop, you’ll need to double-check the storage on those listings. A worrying new trend, spotted in recent weeks, shows that third-party sellers of popular laptop brands are marketing their laptops with terabytes of storage, despite only including a measly 128GB of physical storage capacity, with the rest made up of Microsoft OneDrive cloud storage. It's enough for it to be called a "borderline scam" by one angry commentator.
This has been rumbling on for some time, with complaints on Reddit and social media from bemused consumers about the practice. It’s fair to say that marketing a laptop with over eight times the actual storage it has isn’t ideal, but a further fly in the ointment is that the capacity being offered isn’t even permanent.
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It appears, too, that the practice was even more egregious a few weeks ago, before it gained public attention. A Reddit post in the r/LinusTechTips subreddit showed HP laptops being sold with misleading product headlines. In one of those examples, a HP laptop on sale at Amazon describes 1.2TB of storage, with a mention of its 128GB of physical storage relegated to the second line of the product’s description. That report also confirmed earlier examples of the same issue at Newegg, although those appear to have been removed, at least for now.
At Amazon, however, the issue continues. Multiple examples of laptops with similar headlines, albeit slightly more honest combinations like “1.1TB Storage (1TB OneDrive + 128GB SSD),” remain on sale, including this HP laptop for $499.99. All are being sold by third-party sellers who, in many cases, have established feedback dating back at least a year, with hundreds or thousands of reviews. That laptop, as with many of the other examples I’ve seen, shows only a one-year subscription to Microsoft 365 (which includes OneDrive storage) advertised – that “1.1TB” will start to cost you extra after 12 months.
Practices like this from sellers are certainly not popular. A post on X by Max Weinbach, showcasing another HP laptop on sale, gained nearly 1 million views at the time of publication, with hundreds of reposts and comments, with one user giving it the "borderline scam" description, although there's nothing to suggest that anything illegal is actually taking place here.
It might not be illegal, but it does leave a bad taste in the mouth. Even if you’re reasonably tech savvy, you’ll be expected to look out for the storage ruse from now on. Those who aren’t, who couldn’t tell a OneDrive from an SSD, will be left with a potentially inferior product as a result. While it appears that some of the less descriptive headlines have now changed, there's no indication that the practice is stopping at all.
Let this be a PSA for anyone looking to buy a laptop in the coming weeks and months: don’t trust everything you see, always do your due diligence, and if you’re buying from a third-party seller, make sure to double and triple-check those specs. If it looks too good to be true, well, it might just be.
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